Reviews

MOVING STORY OF LOSS AND YEARNING GIVES 'YIDDISH TANGO' EXTRA PASSION

Saturday, December 16, 2000 by RICHARD WATTENBERG - Special to The Oregonian

In "Shtil, Mayn Corazon -- A Yiddish Tango Cabaret," writer and performer Jenny Levison pays moving homage to a little-known but richly resonant tradition in which Yiddish song lyrics and Argentine dance music come together.

Levison sings a number of Yiddish tangos, which she has set within a narrative frame that may have been constructed to give the evening of tangos some coherence, but, nevertheless, is such a stirring tale of loss and yearning that it intensifies the power of the music. The interweaving of Yiddish tangos and narrative text vividly conveys the way Yiddish lyrics and tango music expressed the hopes and pains of a suffering Jewish people.

The story traces the life of a talented Yiddish Theater singer, who performs during the pre-World War II years first in her native Poland and then on tour to Argentina, where she meets the love of her life, a Jewish immigrant musician. At the end of her tour, she leaves her lover to return to Poland for what she hopes will be only a brief period. Unfortunately, her hopes are overwhelmed by the rush of history.

With the outbreak of war our heroine is unable to return to Argentina, which bans Jewish immigration. To survive, she sings Yiddish tangos to entertain Nazis, but even so she and her family are herded into a ghetto, where her mother and father die. Narrowly avoiding a death camp fate, she offers consolation to the remaining ghetto residents by singing tangos whenever possible.

After the war, the heroine immigrates to the United States. She discovers that her prewar lover, assuming she was dead, has entered into a loveless marriage. Despite the tricks of destiny, their mutual passion lives on through years of correspondence.

As narrator, Levison tells her tale with honesty, and, as a singer, she vocalizes a sweeping range of emotion. Some of her songs take on a harsh edge, which suggests a Brechtian brashness, but for the most part Levison moves in a more evocatively tender direction. While she captures the pathos and desire of her heroine in song, she also assumes the characters of the heroine's lover as well as her brother for some of the tangos. In the latter cases, she ably expresses a sense of character through gesture and body language.

Under the adept stage direction of Rebecca Bayla Taichman and Dan Fields and musical direction of Pablo Aslan, Levison is accompanied by a smoothly proficient tango-dancing couple, Bill Alsup and Gillian Leichtling, and the fine-sounding five-piece Tango Meydl Orchestra.

In one scene, Levison, the two dancers and two musicians, tightly bounded within a small square of light, convey the danger, fear and hope of ghetto denizens seeking solace in a tango. Reflecting on that scene, or the life-affirming closing moments when Levison joins the two dancers for a final tango, one can't help but be struck by the simple, eloquent fusion of music, movement and song that this production offers.

****

Portland, Oregon All Things Argentine Tango & Book

http://members.aol.com/atango2/

Polly McBride

If you attended one or more performances of Jenny Levison's "Shtil Mayn Corazon," the comment "What a treasured gift she has given the tango world" will sound like an understatement.

Jenny's detailed, extensive research for personal and musical tango roots resulted in an exquisite combination of music, singing, storytelling, dancing, and sharing her personal experience.

The audience was spellbound. We were drawn into the drama through our own experiences with everlasting love, longing, loneliness, and lingering memories, as well as through our understanding of its haunting historical basis. The combination of telling her grandmother's love story through prose and poetic music was a touch of genius.

The musical selections were played by Pablo Aslan's gifted musicians with artistic finesse, capturing the soulfulness of lyrics and melodies.

Her contribution has greatly enhanced and enriched our tango life. We understand far more about the sometimes extraordinary cultural blendings that were catalytic in creating the tango we know and love.

Jenny's story gently, powerfully, indelibly reminds us that tango is so much more than music and dance.

In addition to Jenny's dynamic production and presentation, her two dancers, Gillian Leichtling and Bill Alsup added just the right flavor with their deliciously innocently provocative twirling, entertwining tangos. ÊTheir portrayals contributed greatly to bringing the story closer to the audience and vice versa.

Staging, lighting, wardrobe, setting, publicity were all excellently done. What an achievement. What a story, on and off the stage.

If this production becomes available on video, run -- do not walk -- to purchase a copy. Ditto CD.

Features

Dance to a Yiddish Beat

Part Cabaret, theater and history, "Shtil, Mayn Corazon" revives an art form

Saturday, December 16, 2000

Jenny Levison remembers the moment that launched her into a music-historical odyssey seven years ago, when she just happened to be studying Yiddish song and learning to dance Argentinian tango.

"I had just learned a song called 'Zol Shoyn Kumen Di Geule' ("The Messiah must soon come"), a Jewish melody with words written by Shmerke Kaczerginsky," the 38-year-old performer says. "So, I was on the dance floor here in Portland, and all of a sudden in the middle of a recorded Argentine tango I hear this melody. And my head is spinning -- that's 'Zol Shoyn Kumen Di Geule!' And so I started asking questions: Where could that have come from? Why is that obviously Jewish melody in this Argentine tango?"

Those questions led her as far as Buenos Aires, and her inquiries have yielded thus far a huge collection of tangos with Yiddish lyrics and tangos by Jewish composers -- from the camps, from the ghettos and from Argentina. From them, she has devised "Shtil, Mayn Corazon -- A Yiddish Tango Cabaret," which premieres in Portland this weekend.

If this confluence of Jewish traditional music with tango -- two kinds of music that have lately been resurgent -- comes as a surprise, it's largely a matter of perspective. As Levison points out, "In North America, we don't think much about the Jewish presence in South America. This is not as huge a surprise in Argentina."

In fact, Jewish influences began to be felt not long after tango arose among the Argentinian demimonde at the end of the 19th century. In 1907, a recording project brought the form to Paris. "Europeans went whacko, crazy for tango," Levison says. It rapidly spread throughout Europe, and in places such as Poland, Latvia and Russia, Jewish musicians wrote and played tangos extensively. Later, emigrants brought tango across the North Atlantic, and it became a fixture in the Second Avenue Yiddish theaters in New York City.

Given this rich history, what seems surprising is that tango with Yiddish lyrics isn't better known. But with the decimation of European Jewry, the suppression of tango by the military governments of Argentina, and the marginalization of Yiddish theater -- not to mention the explosion of American and British pop, a suddenly monumental feature on the cultural landscape that cast a long shadow over many traditional genres -- it began to vanish.

Levison didn't originally intend to make history, or theater, part of her show. "My goal was to sing the Yiddish lyrics with good orchestrations," she says. "But when I started to put that together I found that it was going to be a dull concert -- and everyone wanted to know, 'Why Yiddish tango? How Yiddish tango? Where does Yiddish tango come from?' " So on top of the two-year task of transcribing the music, translating the lyrics (from both Yiddish and Spanish) and writing singable English versions, she wrote a play.

"Basically what I've done is made up a character, a Yiddish theater singer, who performs Yiddish tangos in all the places where I know they're from -- she starts in pre-war Poland and Argentina, she returns to Poland and sings in the ghetto, she emigrates to the United States. There's a lot of tango in Yiddish theater in Argentina, especially in the '50s and '60s, so I've got another character in the play who is a Jewish immigrant to Argentina."

On top of the dramatization, Levison still needed good orchestrations to round out "Shtil, Mayn Corazon" (which means, incidentally, "Still, My Heart" in Yiddish and Spanish). "The truth is," she says, "Most of the Yiddish tangos I've collected are very schmaltzy -- they're not the songs that great musicians like to play. The original orchestrations aren't great." So she turned over the work of re-arranging all but one of a dozen-and-a-half tangos to Pablo Aslan, a renowned Argentinian bassist who recently toured Japan and the United States with Yo-Yo Ma and members of the Astor Piazzolla Quintet.

Aslan will lead a five-piece tango orchestra in the show, which also includes tango dancers Gillian Leichtling and Bill Alsup (plus, since it's a cabaret-style show, any tango enthusiasts in the audience who care to join in).

So "Shtil, Mayn Corazon" is a concert, a cabaret, a work of theater and history and remembrance -- and an answer to the questions that struck its writer, producer, and star on a dance floor seven years ago. You can reach James McQuillen at 503-221-8210 and by e-mail at jamesmcquillen@news.oregonian.com.

Yiddish Tango

Jenny levison comes home to Portland with a song and a dance

by Paul Haist, December 1, 2000, Kislev 4, 5761

Yiddish tango will come to Portland this month when Portland native Jenny Levison comes home from New York City with her group the Tango Meydl Orchestra to perform the international premiere of "Shtil, Mayn Corazon" (Still, My Heart) at the North Star Ballroom and the Mittleman Jewish Community Center.

"Shtil, Mayn Corazon" is a dramatic musical and tango dance presentation in which Levison sings the little-known repertoire of Yiddish tango and tells a story of Jewish life and immigration in Eastern Europe, Argentina and the United States.

Conceived and written by Levison, the performance is backed up by the five-piece Tango Meydl Orchestra that accompanies Levison's vocals and the dancing of Bill Alsup and Gillian Leichtling.

While the performance draws on Levison's artistic fascination with Yiddish music and tango, there is more to what she does than mere art.

"Yiddish music speaks very strongly for immigrant peoples," said Levison in a recent conversation with the Jewish Review. "My whole theme is how people use art and culture and, in this case, tango to survive and thrive when they have been displaced."

Elsewhere, she has said that she is inspired by the union of art and politics.

"I feel that Yiddish music is most relevant today in two capacities: as the voice of a living tradition in its own right, and also as a voice of today's refugees and immigrants."

In "Shtil, Mayn Corazon" Levison has created a character who is a Yiddish theater singer from Poland who tours pre-war Argentina where she meets a man with whom she falls in love and vows to return to after first going home to Poland. But in Poland the Nazis confine her with other Jews in a ghetto.

Levison said that she narrates the performance.

"The narrator sings in the voice of the narrator and in the voice of each of the characters," she said. Not wanting to reveal how the story ends, she added only that "Act II begins in the ghetto and resolves in the voice of the narrator."

Levison's interest in Yiddish tango dates to one evening in 1993, the year she started singing Yiddish and dancing tango, which began for her as separate interests.

"I was on the dance floor when I heard something that made me stop in my tracks. Right in the middle of an Argentine tango was a violin playing the melody to "Zol Shoyn Kumen Di Geule," a Yiddish folk song I had just learned earlier that year."

After that epiphany, she noticed other Yiddish melodies in Argentine tangos and then discovered many tangos in the Yiddish music repertoire.

She began to research the phenomenon, a process that took her from New York City's YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and ultimately to Buenos Aires.

"Friends started sending me Yiddish tangos that they had on old 78's. I dug through all the published books of Yiddish songs, and before long I had a collection of over 150 tangos with Yiddish lyrics, and dozens more tangos with Polish or Spanish lyrics written by Jewish composers and lyricists," she said.

The tangos came from a variety of sources, including pre-war Poland, Argentine ghettos and from Yiddish theater before and after World War II.

She said she wanted to sing this repertoire and "to present the material in a way that would combine theater, dance and music and that would integrate my interest in how immigrant communities use art and culture from their countries of origin as well as their new homes to survive and thrive when faced with displacement."

Thus was born "Shtil, Mayn Corazon."

The program will be presented in Portland at the North Star Ballroom, 635 N. Killingsworth Ct. Dec 14-16 at 7:30 p.m. and Dec. 17 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.

A preview performance is scheduled for Dec. 13 at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, 6651 SW Capitol Hwy.

Tickets are $15 ($12 for MJCC members) and are available at the MJCC box office (503-244-0111) or through all Fred Meyer FASTIXX outlets. From FASTIXX they may be charged by phone at 503-224-TIXX or 800-992-TIXX, or on the Web at "http://www.fastixx.com". FASTIXX charges a $3-per-ticket convenience fee and a $2.50-per-order handling fee.

Little known repertoire of Yiddish tango tells evocative story of Jewish life and immigration in Eastern Europe, Argentina, and United States.

By Dave Mazza

This month Portlanders will have the opportunity to glimpse a rare facet of the Jewish experience. Thanks to the work of artist-activist Jenny Levison, local theatre goers can experience the sights and sounds of Yiddish tango, a popular part of the Yiddish theater repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s that eventually gave voice to Jewish resistance to persecution. Levison will be presenting Shtil Mayn Corazon (Still, My Heart in Yiddish and Spanish), aYiddish tango cabaret performance Dec. 13-17 in Portland (see box).

The tango is about love, passion and bittersweet memories of a lost homeland. The music emerged from the barrios of Buenos Aires in the 1880s as the flow of immigrants to North America and South America began to reach record highs. By the turn of the century, the tango had broken out of its immigrant communities, swept through the leisure classes of Buenos Aires and made its way back to Europe, where the tango became the toast of European society.

With the tango reaching the peak of its popularity in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, tango orchestras were soon moving into Eastern and Central Europe. Thriving klezmer and Yiddish theater soon incorporated Yiddish tango as part of the repertoire. In some cases, the things had come full cycle as music influenced by Jewish immigrants returned home.

With the outbreak of World War II, Yiddish tango soon became the music of resistance in Europe1Ú4s Jewish ghettos and the concentration camps. For many Jews, the tango became a way to record their experiences, to ensure that some trace remained that others would carry forward. But as is the case with so much ethnic music, material is being lost through changing tastes, the cultural dominance of the United States and other developed nations, and through the fact that may who were present during the heyday of Yiddish tango are dying off without someone to pass on the traditions.

Part of the importance of Shtil, Mayn Corazon, is the contribution Levison has made to preserving this fading tradition. Over the past seven years Levison has been researching Yiddish tango, collecting over 150 tangos with Yiddish lyrics in the process. She also traveled to Argentina to study traditional tango dancing and to seek out Yiddish tango in the Jewish communities in Buenos Aires. At present, Levison is probably the only person who has researched and collected Yiddish tango to this extent. Her work in preserving this heritage resulted in her being the 1999-2000 recipient of the Lilla Jewel Award for Women Artists granted by the McKenzie River Gathering Foundation.

Levison is well-known in the Portland area for her work in labor education. Her newest project is ANDALE -- A New Different Approach to Labor Education -- a music and organizing project that draws on the labor and immigration songs of immigrants and refugees. In addition to her educational work, Levison spent several years as a labor organizer with the Workers Organizing Committee where she learned first hand about the experiences of today's working people -- many of them newly arrived immigrants.

In Shtil, Mayn Corazon, Levison recreates a small piece of cabaret life. A theater piece more than a straightforward musical performance, Shtil presents the audience with a story of Jewish immigration through the experiences of a young Jewish woman. Through dance, music and recitations, Levison shares with the audience the the incredible journey Jews of the late 19th and early 20th centuries embarked upon and the way in which they preserved those memories.

Levison is accompanied by an orchestra of internationally known Yiddish and tango musicians under the direction of Pablo Aslan.